If you are like me, you worry that Google or Microsoft will lose the documents you store there in the cloud. They have never lost anything of mine, so far. However, if something goes wrong with your system, are you sure they will be able to recover it? Just to be safe, I make a backup.
You can use Google Drive in two ways. You can write documents there using Google Docs, or you can write documents using Microsoft Word and save them in Google Drive. You can also upload files of any type and store them there. However, you should not store large files in Google Drive as you will run out of space and have to pay Google for more storage.
Files on which you write using Google Docs exist as web pages. They might look like a document or spreadsheet, but really they are ordinary web pages. How do you back up web pages?
Google is very clever about this. They convert those web pages to Microsoft equivalent documents when you back them up. That gives you something tangible that you can hold.
Note: Google has changed this procedure significantly since December of 2014, which is when they changed Google Drive to the new design. Prior to that, when you selected the download feature, it zipped up the files, and then gave you the chance to have Google email the files when they were done. Now, it zips them up and then downloads them straight away.
Back Up Google Docs
1.Click on the file folder, and select Download.
2.Then, at the bottom of the browser, a dialogue box will appear, showing that the files are being zipped. Then, it will start downloading automatically.
3.As you can see, when I click on the downloaded file and open the zip file, the Google document I wrote “The Avocado Republic” in Google Docs has been converted to Microsoft Word Format. This is quite clever.
4.Now, copy this some place safe such as an external USB drive.
